Short measures (iii): Wordsworth’s Rainbow

Short measures is a very occasional series in which I discuss a short poem (no more than twelve lines - shorter than a sonnet, therefore). Alas, for copyright reasons I can rarely publish a complete 20th. century poem or one by a living author. Suggestions for future poems to include in the series are always welcome.

My heart leapt up on Friday last week when I beheld a rainbow over Norwich Castle. At eight minutes past five I came out of M&S and saw the great arch of a perfect rainbow landing on top of the Norman Keep. It was a fine sight over what advertisers used to call ‘A fine city, Norwich’ - and unexpected, too: the pavements were dry and wherever else it had been raining, it wasn’t raining just then in Norwich.

     My heart leaps up when I behold

     A rainbow in the sky.

     So was it when I first began,

     So is it now I am a man,

     So be it when I shall grow old

       - Or let me die.

     The child is father to the man,

     And I could wish my days to be

     Bound each to each by natural piety.

I suppose ‘The child is father to the man’ is one of Wordsworth’s best-known lines - along with, say, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’ and perhaps ‘Surprised by joy, impatient as the wind’. But each of these three comes from the opening of a poem. Wordsworth himself, however, would later reproduce the last three lines of ‘The Rainbow’ as the epigraph to his great meditation on childhood, ‘Intimations of Immortality'.

As for ‘My heart leaps us’, these opening words were to echo in the title of one of Wordsworth’s poems of 1800, ‘Hart-Leap Well’. This is a longish poem that begins as a chivalrous ballad celebrating both the heroism of the huntsman and the endurance of the hunted stag. Oddly, the poem’s second half becomes a kind of anti-hunting polemic: no matter that the huntsman had admired the courage of the stag whom he had pursued to the death, the place where the animal had died becomes an accursed spot, a warning to future generations of would-be sportsmen: ‘the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable’, in Oscar Wilde’s neat apothegm.

But unlike the conventions of medieval and renaissance poetry, there is no play on heart/hart in ‘The Rainbow’ itself. The poem, at least its first six lines, seems almost naïve: di-dum di-dum di-dum di-dum, as schoolchildren would once have chanted it. Beware, though, of trivializing this miniature poem: ‘Wow! A rainbow! How exciting is that!’  No, this is more than just another ‘Surprised by joy’ moment.

Any good poem warns against the temptation to take words for granted. I think that ‘behold’ in the first line means much more than simply ‘see’. The word itself more often acts as a command – ‘Ecce homo’– ‘Behold the man!’ – or as an exclamation: ‘Lo and behold!’ Here, though, Wordsworth’s line implies that he simultaneously sees the rainbow and is awe-struck by it – a physical as well as emotional response already foreshadowed by ‘My heart leaps up’. He both beholds the rainbow and is beholden to it: the fact that he responds to it is, as he sees it, proof of his continuing humanity.

The rainbow is not described. By contrast with my trite phrases about the ‘perfect rainbow’ that was such a ‘fine sight’ over Norwich, Wordsworth’s rainbow simply is. Its power to move him is not just a memory from the past (‘when my life began’) that has stayed with him ‘now I am a man’; more importantly, it is a commitment to the future: ‘So be it when I shall grow old’. And if/when he fails to respond,  then it’ll be time to quit: the triple anaphora, ‘So was it - so is it - so be it’, is startlingly undercut by the immediate reversal, ‘ - Or let me die’.  There’s a confident assurance here, as elsewhere in Wordsworth, that nature will not let him down. Nor, for his part, must he fail Nature.

Some I suppose might call this moral earnestness priggish, for the rainbow is about more than pleasure, it is about a moment of passionate recognition, of spiritual illumination. It is a shock and a lesson to last a lifetime. Wordsworth argues repeatedly that Nature, what Coleridge calls (in Frost at Midnight) the ‘Great Universal Teacher’ is the source of mankind’s moral understanding. And like prayer for George Herbert, this is ‘something understood’ instinctively, not something readily put into words, taught in school or learned from books:

One impulse from a vernal wood

   Will teach you more of man,

Of moral evil and of good,

   Than all the sages can.

‘Or let me die’ is both a reversal and a bridge from the naive exhilaration of the opening lines to the mature meditation of the closing. For Wordsworth, that the child is father to the man is so self-evident it needs no explanation. Like the rainbow itself, this just is so: as adults we learn from, and build on, the experiences of childhood. I have always resented the condescension of those who tell children the ‘real world’ is what comes after school – but perhaps that’s because of the implication that teachers don’t live in the real world either.  Did Shakespeare, in As You Like It, coin the phrase ‘second childhood’? Very aptly, if so. During the past twelve months I have spent more time involved with the very elderly than at any other period of my life. Children can literally become parents to their parents. Wordsworth was right.

Finally, ‘natural piety’. Piety used to mean the duty of loyalty and love children owe their parents. Virgil’s Aeneas wasn’t pious because he was always on his knees: he acknowledged the duty due to his father Anchises. For Wordsworth, that piety is both a natural impulse and an impulse of loyalty to nature itself. So, in ‘The Rainbow’ he simply says that this dual impulse is what - all being well (‘I could wish’) - will keep us going for a lifetime. It’s a grown-up idea, carefully planted in a childlike, but not childish, poem.

Adrian Barlow

[photo: Rainbow over Norwich Castle © the author

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Bedford: Betjeman: Bunyan

“Am in Bedford. Why?” This anguished telegram, apocryphally sent by G.K. Chesterton, came to my mind last Friday evening as I set out from Bedford station to walk across the town. The initial impression is discouraging: you don’t want to linger long in Midland Road. But once you have reached the old Bedford Modern School – its Blore façade now politely hiding the shopping centre behind it - things rapidly improve: St. Paul’s Square, the town bridge and Henry Holland’s Swan Hotel, which Pevsner describes as “the noblest hotel of the age, very severe and classical” all raise the spirits. Then the Embankment beckons.

“The best thing visually about Bedford is the way the town has treated its river. Few English towns can be compared” (Pevsner again). He’s right, and others before him have said much the same. In 1712 Lady Celia Fiennes described the scene:

The river runs twineing about and runs into several notches of ground which is sett full of willows, and many little boates chained to the sides belonging to the people of the town for their diversion.

Bedford, indeed, was one of the first places in England to discover boating for pleasure. Punts, canoes, skiffs – all these and other craft could be seen enjoying the river between Duck Mill Lane and Newnham; and even last Saturday I saw a neat little Edwardian electric launch putt-putting past the Embankment Hotel. Nowadays, though, most of the activity is strictly athletic, as the Schools’ and Bedford Town Boathouses attest. The Ouse at Bedford is ideal for serious rowing, but an eight raising its stroke-rate while practising for the next regatta allows small margin for messing about on the river: pleasure boats of a sort are confined to Longholme Lake, an unregarded pond squeezed between the upper and lower river. In the days when we had serious winters, this lake used to freeze over, and then everyone turned out to go skating. The scene was Brueghelesque.

After a week of overcoats and raw

Red hands, the ice at last set thick enough

And out the skaters came: the adepts, sure

Of admiration from the young; the tough

Guys, humbled after showing off and then

Upending painfully; the novice boys,

Their ankles splayed about to fall again;

Sledges, and dogs excited by the noise.

These rites of winter need to be observed

To prove the season’s authenticity;

In images like these there is preserved

Our sense of what ‘real winter’ ought to be

                  But rarely is.  Faced with this falling short

                  It’s good to see those scenes that Bruegel caught. 

I wrote that in 1976, after living in Bedford for three years. (Looking at the sestet now, I think I must have been going through an early Philip Larkin phase: I was teaching The Whitsun Weddings at the time.) But I have known the town almost all my life, and it was good to be here again on Saturday. I was on my way to run a day school on ‘John Betjeman: poetry and architecture’* at the admirable Bedford Retirement Education Centre, where I have taught on and off for many years and have many friends. First, though, I wanted not just to enjoy a walk in the early sun along the towpath, but to photograph the town’s war memorial.  It’s a remarkable and unusual memorial, which I shall be discussing in a lecture, ‘Memory, remembrance and memorials’, in Oxford at the end of this month.

Bedford by the river would have appealed strongly to Betjeman with its flower-beds, bandstand, Suspension Bridge and sporty schoolgirls at full stretch on the water, sculling with confidence, blades on the feather. The nearby streets are discreet and chestnut-lined; the shaded late-Victorian villas stand back behind privet hedges. They were built for military and colonial families who settled in Bedford rather than Cheltenham because the local Harpur Trust schools were less expensive and prepared boys for army and civil service careers. The artist Dora Carrington lived in Rothsay Gardens as a child and railed against the suffocating respectability of it all. But at least she learned to be an artist in Bedford, scandalizing the High School by cutting her hair short before going on to the Slade. (I’m looking forward to reading Pat Barker’s new novel, Toby’s Room, part of her new Great War sequence following on from Life-Class, about the Slade at the time Carrington, Gertler, Spencer, Nevinson, Nash et al were there under Professor Henry Tonks.)

One person who knew the river at Bedford all too well but would not recognize it now was the town’s most famous son, John Bunyan. He was imprisoned many times for preaching without a licence:  according to tradition, the town gaol, which he called his ‘den’, was by the town bridge, and it was there he wrote Pilgrim’s Progress. Bedford School sometimes claims Bunyan as  a former pupil –rather improbably, I used to think – but I once amused myself by imagining him transported forward three hundred years to 1978 and turning up for an Old Boys’ weekend:

The old boy by the Ouse, dismayed at blacks

   And skateboard boys, stood mute against the roar

Of juggernauts and wished he’d not come back:

   Bunyan, returning, hated what he saw.

Here where his den once was he now could see

   Little to urge the words “I knew this place”

Onto his lips: only above the trees

   A spire still occupied its proper space.

Well, that at least was something.  But there must

   Be someone there, some face he knew? Just then

He spotted Talkative, that pair Mistrust

   And Timorous (those too familiar men)

      And all the rest.

                                          So he was glad he came:

      Bunyan began to feel at home again.

Walking along the Bedford Embankment last Saturday, knowing I should soon be back among familiar faces and oId friends, I too began to feel almost at home again, though it’s now all but thirty years since I actually lived in Kingsley Road, a minute’s easy walk from the river.

Adrian Barlow

* Among the poems I discussed was ‘Potpourri from a Surrey Garden’, about which I wrote in a post earlier this year: John Betjeman and Windlesham.

[Illustrations:  (i) The River Ouse at Bedford, with the suspension bridge in the foreground; the Swan Hotel and St Paul’s Church spire in the distance (ii) the Bedford War Memorial, by Charles Sergeant Jagger (1921)

Photographs © Adrian Barlow 29.09.12

Marianne, Dickens and Kate

“The maidenly bosom bared to this …”

This, here, is not a paparazzo’s telephoto lens; it is a reference by Charles Dickens to the Carmagnole, the revolutionaries’ dance around the guillotine which so terrifies the heroine of A Tale of Two Cities, Lucie Manette:

a something, once innocent, delivered over to all devilry – a healthy pastime changed into a means of angering the blood, bewildering the senses, and steeling the heart. Such grace as was visible in it, made it the uglier, showing how warped and perverted all things good by nature were become. The maidenly bosom bared to this, the pretty almost child’s head, thus distracted, the delicate foot mincing in this slough of blood and dirt, were types of the disjointed time.

A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Book the Third, Ch.5; Everyman edition 1994, p.281

The uncoverage of the Duchess of Cambridge in the French press this week has been accompanied by some attempts at humour in the ‘Allo Allo’ vein. One picture caption in Closer chortles, ‘Les français ont le buste de Marianne. Maintenant, les Anglais ont celui de Kate!’ Actually, I think Dickens had Marianne in mind when he wrote about the ‘maidenly bosom’, because a little later in the novel he returns to the Carmagnole and this time he describes how a young woman was lifted into a chair by the dancing mob and carried shoulder-high ‘as the Goddess of Liberty’ (p.288).

Now Marianne, usually (but not always) bare-breasted, is the personification of the Goddess of Liberty, and a French national icon. Think of Delacroix’s celebrated painting, ‘Liberty Leading the People’ (1830) which depicts Marianne storming the barricades, the tricolor streaming in the wind as she holds it aloft. This picture, and Marianne herself, have been powerful representations of la République ever since, though Marianne made her first appearance during the French Revolution, at least as early as 1792.

I have argued elsewhere* that the figure of the young woman in the foreground of Phiz’s wonderful illustration of the Carmagnole for A Tale of Two Cities is not just a discreet depicting of ‘the maidenly bosom bared to this’. She is actually Delacroix’s Liberty with her back to the viewer – no doubt because the mid-Victorian readers of All the Year Round  (in which A Tale of Two Cities was serialized) would have been shocked by a full-frontal Marianne. Given that Phiz brought into this picture elements of the story from both before and after the actual event depicted, I now think we are to understand that the young woman introduced by Dickens, whose delicate foot is faithfully drawn by Phiz  (real name: Hablot K Browne) ‘mincing in the blood and dirt’, is also the young woman later carried aloft as the Goddess of Liberty.

I have been re-reading A Tale of Two Cities this past week, and as it happens I have been doing so in France, on holiday. This is how I’ve been able to obtain a copy of the infamous Closer, of which I had never heard until yesterday. I must say, it treads a fine line between sleazy innuendo and sanctimonious twaddle. Contrasting the pictures of Kate sunbathing (“Elle a épousé le prince des Anglais, mais elle aime bien aussi le roi soleil”) with Prince Harry’s recent embarrassments, Closer’s Samuel Cannes glozes:

Il n’est pas question ici d’alcool, de strip billiard ou de positions équivoques, mais simplement d’une épouse bien dans son corps [“Geddit??”, as Glenda Slag use to demand in Private Eye] qui n’a strictment rien à cacher à son mari .

The disingenuousness is staggering.

Back to Marianne.  In Normandy this week we have been visiting chateaux. I wanted to see if they would add to my sense of Dickens’ mastery of fact and detail in the chapters of A Tale of Two Cities set in and around the chateau of the fearsome Monseigneur. (I’ll write about this another time.)  I’ve also been studying French war memorials, in preparation for a lecture I’m to give in Oxford next month. Yesterday, on the way back to the Portsmouth ferry from Caen, we drove through the small town of Trevières and came unexpectedly upon what must be one of the most provocative images of Marianne in all France – though not in any sense Closer would understand.

The town’s First World War memorial depicts Marianne as a French poilu, an ordinary foot soldier. On her head she wears an adrian, the distinctive French infantry helmet; over her dress she bears the soldier’s kit, with ammunition pouches etc. Her belt and bayonet sheath are slung over the arm of a cross against which she rests, but her sleeves are rolled up and she is ready for action. . Like Delacroix’s Marianne, she brandishes a weapon (her sword) in one hand and her other is outstretched to hold the tricolor.

 So far so good, but I have omitted the most shocking thing about her. She has only half a face. At some moment between 6 – 9^th June 1944, when Allied forces were fighting their way inland from the Normandy beaches, the Trevières War Memorial was struck by shrapnel from a shell and Marianne’s jaw and neck were blown off. She stands now, a ghoulish mutilée de guerre, a memorial no longer to one world war but to two. On the plinth beneath, an inscription describes her in uncompromising but highly ambiguous terms:

CETTE GLORIEUSE STATUE

VICTIME DES COMBATS QUI LIBERERENT

TREVIERES

DU 6 AU 9 JUIN 1944

RAPELLE L’IMAGE DE LA FRANCE MEURTRIE

AU COURS DE LA BATAILLE DE NORMANDIE

PENDENT LE DEBARQUEMENT DES ARMEES ALLIEES

SUR NOS RIVAGES

Whereas Marianne in her earlier incarnations had triumphantly represented France, personified as the goddess of Liberty, now (the inscription implies) she represents the image of that same France murdered (‘meurtrié’) by the allied forces in the process of ‘liberation’. No longer a goddess, she has been made a victim.

You could say the same about Kate.

Adrian Barlow

* I have written about ‘The Sea Rises’ in World and Time: Teaching Literature in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp.214-218)

Illustrations: (i) ‘The Sea Rises’ by Phiz (Hablot K Browne) 1859; (ii) War Memorial at Trevières, Normandy. Photograph © Adrian Barlow 2012

Ruth Etchells remembered

The Lent Term course on 18^th century English Literature was not going well. No one seemed keen on the Augustan age. One lecturer assured us that ‘To the Memory of Mr Oldham’ was the only poem by Dryden worth reading; the speaker on Swift got hopelessly bogged down in the Battle of the Books, and Derek Todd, lecturing on Pope, broke off in mid-sentence and announced, his face contorted into a memorable grimace, ‘I fear I’ve been grappling with the problem of satire for far too long.’

This was Durham, 1969, my second year reading English there. Towards the end of the term few of us were still putting ourselves through the weekly agony of the course. But then everything changed. Ruth Etchells (whose death occurred last month but whose obituary I only read in The Guardian yesterday) gave a memorable lecture on Robinson Crusoe.  It was a masterclass, both on lecturing itself and on a novel most of us had never thought of taking seriously before that moment. She began with the idea that making huts, dens, camps – creating secret kingdoms – is a profound childhood instinct, a fantasy of adulthood created by children.  She explored with us the reasons why Defoe’s novel appealed to young readers, and even looked at the way the novel had been adapted as a Ladybird book. Disillusioned no longer, we were hooked. And once she had hooked us, Ruth reeled us in with an exhilarating discussion of the imagery of the novel, and then of its significant contrasts: a book, she argued, that turned a desert island idyll into a tory treatise on middle-class social self-reliance. She showed us how the narrative worked. It was the sort of analysis we were learning to admire in The English Novel: Form and Function, Dorothy van Ghent’s guide to English fiction we all bought, and bought into.

Ruth was one of those lecturers, rare at any time, worth listening to whatever their subject. And her seminars were never those slightly awkward events where one or two eager speakers hog the discussions and everyone else hangs back: she involved us all, and made each of us feel our ideas mattered and were worth her serious reflection. She never condescended. I remember her classes on E.M. Forster, and the later conversations on A Passage to India she invited one or two of us to continue back at her flat at Trevelyan College. She loved Forster’s novels and his essays, and gave me a perspective on his importance I have never lost.

We knew some of her colleagues in the English Department disparaged her: hadn’t she come to higher education via school teaching and teacher education? And wasn’t her best-selling book, Unafraid to Be (1969) not strictly academic, a book unashamedly approaching modern writers from a Christian perspective? Actually, her ability to lecture on very recent literature - Pinter, Golding, Hughes, as well as to champion writers like Charles Williams already going out of fashion - showed a blend of imaginative and scholarly engagement with literature we admired in her and missed in her contemporaries. To hear her talk, and to talk with her, about writers and writing was to be convinced that literature mattered profoundly, and never just as an academic exercise.

By my third year at Durham, I knew I wanted to stay on to do research before starting to teach, but doubted I could afford to. Ruth persuaded me to take my PGCE first and then start my M.A, if I could get funding for it. She would supervise me for both years, even though my research (in those days at Durham a Master’s degree was by thesis only) was technically just for twelve months. I wanted to work on Ezra Pound’s early poetry, but wasn’t sure what approach to take. Characteristically, she suggested too many people were working on Pound just then and that I should choose a road less travelled. How about one of the Imagist poets, she asked, since to write about Imagism would still mean writing about Pound? That was how I came to study Richard Aldington, of whom no one in the British literary establishment had anything good to say at that time and on whom no one else in Britain was working at all. Ruth taught me the importance of approaching everything I read with an open mind. ‘We’ll work on him together,’ she said, and we did. I have never regretted my choice.

By the time I officially began my M.A., with the help of a State Studentship that made me self-supporting for a year, my preparation for the research was already well under way. We met once a fortnight to discuss Aldington’s poetry and once a month to submit my latest chapter (hand-written and carbon-copied; I had no typewriter) to her strict but always cheerful scrutiny.

What I learned from Ruth in that year became the foundation for much I have gone on to do since. When Ezra Pound died in November 1972, she suggested I write a 15-minute talk on him and send it to the Third Programme. The BBC turned it down but the producer wrote me a letter encouraging me to keep writing about writers. And later in the year, she arranged for me to give a lecture - at the end of a course on modern writers - on the poetry of Basil Bunting , whom I had got to know well while he had been Northern Arts Poetry Fellow at Durham. This was the first lecture I ever gave. I had an audience of twelve, mostly friends who had turned up out of loyalty or for a laugh; only towards the end did I realise Ruth too had slipped into the Elvet Riverside lecture theatre and was smiling in the back row.

‘That’s just the beginning,’ she said. And she wasn’t wrong.

Adrian Barlow

Read Ruth Etchells’s obituary in The Guardian and Church Times.

[Illustration: Ruth Etchells’ book Unafraid To Be, (IVP 1969)